Four farmers were killed in police firing as a protracted farmers’ agitation against an urban water-supply project in Pune district turned violent on Tuesday afternoon. Several farmers and 20 policemen were injured, two of them seriously. More than 300 protesters were rounded up. A strong crackdown restored traffic on the blocked Pune-Mumbai expressway, Pune rural police said. Around 1.30pm, more than 400 villagers, agitating for years against an urban water supply project they...

Sharp differences persist in the government over whether and how much of an impact the impending food law is likely to have on open market food prices. At a time when input costs for farmers have already gone up significantly and threaten volatility in food prices, the food ministry has dismissed apprehensions voiced by Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices ( CACP) chairman Ashok Gulati on the issue. Last week,...

The Union government on Monday asked the States to prepare a below poverty line (BPL) list by March, census for which is now on, so that the needy are readied to enjoy the benefits to be rolled out under the 12th Five Year Plan. Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh hoped the States would prepare the list at the earliest. The Centre would, by December-end, complete its exercise of generating...

  There are times when fathers and sons say the same things. In 2008, days after terrorists from Pakistan massacred scores of people in Mumbai, a group of affluent young couples met for dinner. They work in large corporations, hold university degrees from the United States and England, subscribe to The Economist and even read it. But it was inevitable that when the men started talking about how the Indian government was too...

Members of Parliament, cutting across party lines, have demanded an increase in the wages and workdays of the beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the UPA government, so as to insulate them from the galloping inflation. The demands were made by the members, including those of the ruling Congress-led ruling coalition, at a meeting of the parliamentary consultative committee on the...